Blind Assassin (77 page)

Over the years my grandfather bought up other mills and turned them into factories as well. He had a knitting factory for undershirts and combinations, another one for socks, and another one that made small ceramic objects such as ashtrays. He prided himself on the conditions in his factories: he listened to complaints when anyone was brave enough to make them, he regretted injuries when they’d been brought to his notice. He kept up with mechanical improvements, indeed with improvements of all kinds. He was the first factory owner in town to introduce electric lighting. He thought flower beds were good for the workers’ morale—zinnias and snapdragons were his stand-bys, as they were inexpensive and showy and lasted a long time. He declared that conditions for the females in his employ were as safe as those in their own parlours. (He assumed they had parlours. He assumed these parlours were safe. He liked to think well of everybody.) He refused to tolerate drunkenness on the job, or coarse language, or loose behaviour.

Or this is what is said of him in
The Chase Industries: A History,
a book my grandfather commissioned in 1903 and had privately printed, in green leather covers, with riot only the title but his own candid, heavy signature embossed on the front in gold. He used to present copies of this otiose chronicle to his business associates, who must have been surprised, though perhaps not. It must have been considered the done thing, because if it hadn’t been, my Grandmother Adelia wouldn’t have allowed him to do it.

I sat on the park bench, gnawing away at my cookie. It was huge, the size of a cow pat, the way they make them now—tasteless, crumbly, greasy—and I couldn’t seem to make my way through it. It wasn’t the right thing for such warm weather. I was feeling a little dizzy too, which could have been the coffee.

I set the cup down beside me and my cane clattered off the bench onto the floor. I leant over sideways, but I couldn’t reach it. Then I lost my balance and knocked the coffee over. I could feel it through the cloth of my skirt, lukewarm. There would be a brown patch when I stood up, as if I’d been incontinent. That’s what people would think.

Why do we always assume at such moments that everyone in the world is staring at us? Usually nobody is. But Myra was. She must have seen me come in; she must have been keeping an eye on me. She hurried out of her shop. “You’re white as a sheet! You look all in,” she said. “Let’s just mop that up! Bless your soul, did you walk all the way over here? You can’t walk back! I better call Walter—he can run you home.”

“I can manage,” I told her. “There’s nothing wrong with me.” But I let her do it.

Avilion

My bones have been aching again, as they often do in humid weather. They ache like history: things long done with, that still reverberate as pain. When the ache is bad enough it keeps me from sleeping. Every night I yearn for sleep, I strive for it; yet it flutters on ahead of me like a sooty curtain. There are sleeping pills, of course, but the doctor has warned me against them.

Last night, after what seemed hours of damp turmoil, I got up and crept slipperless down the stairs, feeling my way in the faint shine from the street light outside the stairwell window. Once safely arrived at the bottom, I shambled into the kitchen and nosed around in the misty dazzle of the refrigerator. There was nothing much I wanted to eat: the draggled remains of a bunch of celery, a blue-tinged heel of bread, a lemon going soft. An end of cheese, wrapped in greasy paper and hard and translucent as toenails. I’ve fallen into the habits of the solitary; my meals are snatched and random. Furtive snacks, furtive treats and picnics. I made do with some peanut butter, scooped directly from the jar with a forefinger: why dirty a spoon?

Standing there with the jar in one hand and my finger in my mouth, I had the feeling that someone was about to walk into the room—some other woman, the unseen, valid owner—and ask me what in hell I was doing in her kitchen. I’ve had it before, the sense that even in the course of my most legitimate and daily actions—peeling a banana, brushing my teeth—I am trespassing.

At night the house was more than ever like a stranger’s. I wandered through the front rooms, the dining room, the parlour, hand on the wall for balance. My various possessions were floating in their own pools of shadow, detached from me, denying my ownership of them. I looked them over with a burglar’s eye, deciding what might be worth the risk of stealing, what on the other hand I would leave behind. Robbers would take the obvious things—the silver teapot that was my grandmother’s, perhaps the hand-painted china. The remaining monogrammed spoons. The television set. Nothing I really want.

All of it will have to be gone through, disposed of by someone or other, when I die. Myra will corner the job, no doubt; she thinks she has inherited me from Reenie. She’ll enjoy playing the trusted family retainer. I don’t envy her: any life is a rubbish dump even while it’s being lived, and more so afterwards. But if a rubbish dump, a surprisingly small one; when you’ve cleared up after the dead, you know how few green plastic garbage bags you yourself are likely to take up in your turn.

The nutcracker shaped like an alligator, the lone mother-of pearl cuff link, the tortoiseshell comb with missing teeth. The broken silver lighter, the saucerless cup, the cruet stand minus the vinegar. The scattered bones of
home,
the rags, the relics. Shards washed ashore after shipwreck.

Today Myra persuaded me to buy an electric fan—one on a tall stand, better than the creaky little thing I’ve been relying on. The sort she had in mind was on sale at the new mall across the Jogues River bridge. She would drive me there: she was going anyway, it would be no trouble. It’s dispiriting, the way she invents pretexts.

Our route took us past Avilion, or what was once Avilion, now so sadly transformed. Valhalla, it is now. What bureaucratic moron decided this was a suitable name for an old-age home? As I recall, Valhalla was where you went after you were dead, not immediately before. But perhaps some point was intended.

The location is prime—the east bank of the Louveteau River, at the confluence with the Jogues—thus combining a romantic view of the Gorge with a safe mooring for sailboats. The house is large but it looks crowded now, shouldered aside by the flimsy bungalows that went up on the grounds after the war. Three elderly women were sitting on the front porch, one in a wheelchair, furtively smoking, like naughty adolescents in the washroom. One of these days they’ll burn the place down for sure.

I haven’t been back inside Avilion since they converted it; it reeks no doubt of baby powder and sour urine and day-old boiled potatoes. I’d rather remember it the way it was, even at the time I knew it, when shabbiness was already setting in—the cool, spacious halls, the polished expanse of the kitchen, the Sevres bowl filled with dried petals on the small round cherrywood table in the front hall. Upstairs, in Laura’s room, there’s a chip out of the mantelpiece, from where she dropped a firedog; so typical. I’m the only person who knows this, any more. Considering her appearance—her lucent skin, her look of pliability, her long ballerina’s neck—people expected her to be graceful.

Avilion is not the standard-issue limestone. Its planners wanted something more unusual, and so it is constructed of rounded river cobblestones all cemented together. From a distance the effect is warty, like the skin of a dinosaur or the wishing wells in picture books. Ambition’s mausoleum, I think of it now.

It isn’t a particularly elegant house, but it was once thought imposing in its way—a merchant’s palace, with a curved driveway leading to it, a stumpy Gothic turret, and a wide semi-circular spooled verandah overlooking the two rivers, where tea was served to ladies in flowered hats during the languid summer afternoons at the century’s turn. String quartets were once stationed there for garden parties; my grandmother and her friends used it as a stage, for amateur theatricals, at dusk, with torches set around; Laura and I used to hide under it. It’s begun to sag, that verandah; it needs a paint job.

Once there was a gazebo, and a walled kitchen garden, and several plots of ornamentals, and a lily pond with goldfish in it, and a steam-heated glass conservatory, demolished now, that grew ferns and fuschias and the occasional spindly lemon and sour orange. There was a billiards room, and a drawing room and a morning room, and a library with a marble Medusa over the fireplace—the nineteenth-century type of Medusa, with a lovely impervious gaze, the snakes writhing up out of her head like anguished thoughts. The mantelpiece was French: a different one had been ordered, something with Dionysus and vines, but the Medusa came instead, and France was a long way to send it back, and so they used that one.

There was a vast dim dining room with William Morris wallpaper, the Strawberry Thief design, and a chandelier entwined with bronze water-lilies, and three high stained-glass windows, shipped in from England, showing episodes from the story of Tristan and Iseult (the proffering of the love potion, in a ruby-red cup; the lovers, Tristan on one knee, Iseult yearning over him with her yellow hair cascading—hard to render in glass, a little too much like a melting broom; Iseult alone, dejected, in purple draperies, a harp nearby).

The planning and decoration of this house were supervised by my Grandmother Adelia. She died before I was born, but from what I’ve heard she was as smooth as silk and as cool as a cucumber, but with a will like a bone saw. Also she went in for Culture, which gave her a certain moral authority. It wouldn’t now; but people believed, then, that Culture could make you better—a better person. They believed it could uplift you, or the women believed it. They hadn’t yet seen Hitler at the opera house.

Adelia’s maiden name was Montfort. She was from an established family, or what passed for it in Canada—second-generation Montreal English crossed with Huguenot French. These Montforts had been prosperous once—they’d made a bundle on railroads—but through risky speculations and inertia they were already halfway down the slippery slope. So when time had begun to run out on Adelia with no really acceptable husband in sight, she’d married money—crude money, button money. She was expected to refine this money, like oil.

(She wasn’t married, she was married off, said Reenie, rolling out the gingersnaps. The family arranged it. That’s what was done in such families, and who’s to say it was any worse or better than choosing for yourself? In any case, Adelia Montfort did her duty, and lucky to have the chance, as she was getting long in the tooth by then—she must have been twenty-three, which was counted over the hill in those days.)

I still have a portrait of my grandparents; it’s set in a silver frame, with convolvulus blossoms, and was taken soon after their wedding. In the background are a fringed velvet curtain and two ferns on stands. Grandmother Adelia reclines on a chaise, a heavy-lidded, handsome woman, in many draperies and a long double string of pearls and a plunging, lace-bordered neckline, her white forearms boneless as rolled chicken. Grandfather Benjamin sits behind her in formal kit, substantial but embarrassed, as if he’s been tarted up for the occasion. They both look corseted.

When I was the age for it—thirteen, fourteen—I used to romanticize Adelia. I would gaze out of my window at night, over the lawns and the moon-silvered beds of ornamentals, and see her trailing wistfully through the grounds in a white lace tea gown. I gave her a languorous, world-weary, faintly mocking smile. Soon I added a lover. She would meet this lover outside the conservatory, which by that time was neglected—my father had no interest in steam-heated orange trees—but I restored it in my mind, and supplied it with hothouse flowers. Orchids, I thought, or camellias. (I didn’t know what a camellia was, but I’d read about them.) My grandmother and the lover would disappear inside, and do what? I wasn’t sure.

In reality the chances of Adelia having had a lover were nil. The town was too small, its morals were too provincial, she had too far to fall. She wasn’t a fool. Also she had no money of her own.

As hostess and household manager, Adelia did well by Benjamin Chase. She prided herself on her taste, and my grandfather deferred to her in this because her taste was one of the things he’d married her for. He was forty by then; he’d worked hard at making his fortune, and now he intended to get his money’s worth, which meant being patronized by his new bride about his wardrobe and bullied about his table manners. In his own way he also wanted Culture, or at least the concrete evidence of it. He wanted the right china.

He got that, and the twelve-course dinners that went along with it: celery and salted nuts first, chocolates at the end. Consommé, rissoles, timbales, the fish, the roast, the cheese, the fruit, hothouse grapes draped over the etched-glass epergne. Railway-hotel food, I think of it now; ocean-liner food. Prime ministers came to Port Ticonderoga—by that time the town had several prominent manufacturers, whose support for political parties was valued—and Avilion was where they stayed. There were photographs of Grandfather Benjamin with three prime ministers in turn, framed in gold and hung in the library—Sir John Sparrow Thompson, Sir Mackenzie Bowell, Sir Charles Tupper. They must have preferred the food there to anything else on offer.

Adelia’s task would have been to design and order these dinners, then to avoid being seen to devour them. Custom would have dictated that she only pick at her food while in company: chewing and swallowing were such blatantly carnal activities. I expect she had a tray sent up to her room, afterwards. Ate with ten fingers.

Avilion was completed in 1889, and christened by Adelia. She took the name from Tennyson:

The island-valley of Avilion;

Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,

Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies

Deep-meadow’d, happy, fair with orchard lawns

And bowery hollows crown’d with summer sea,…

She had this quotation printed on the left-hand inner side of her Christmas cards. (Tennyson was somewhat out of date, by English standards—Oscar Wilde was in the ascendant then, at least among the younger set—but then, everything in Port Ticonderoga was somewhat out of date.)

People—people in town—must have laughed at her for this quotation: even those with social pretensions referred to her as Her Ladyship or the Duchess, though they were wounded if left off her invitation lists. About her Christmas cards they must have said,
Well, she’s out of luck about the hail and snow. Maybe she’ll have a word with God about that.
Or perhaps, down at the factories:
Seen any of them bowery hollows around here, anywheres but down the front of her dress?
I know their style and I doubt that it’s changed a lot.

Adelia was showing off with her Christmas card, but I believe there was more to it. Avilion was where King Arthur went to die. Surely Adelia’s choice of name signifies how hopelessly in exile she considered herself to be: she might be able to call into being by sheer force of will some shoddy facsimile of a happy isle, but it would never be the real thing. She wanted a salon; she wanted artistic people, poets and composers and scientific thinkers and the like, as she had seen while visiting her English third cousins, when her family still had money. A golden life, with wide lawns.

But such people were not to be found in Port Ticonderoga, and Benjamin refused to travel. He needed to be near his factories, he said. Most likely he didn’t want to be dragged into a crowd that would sneer at him for his button manufacturing, and where there might be unknown pieces of cutlery lying in wait, and where Adelia would feel ashamed because of him.